Six Years After Columbine&#133; Time for Common Sense Again

About the Authors

Six years have passed since Eric
Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students and a teacher at
Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo. Barely six weeks have
passed since the latest schoolhouse massacre left nine people dead
at Red Lake High in Red Lake, Minn.

Unfortunately, one legacy of these tragedies has been the
well-meaning efforts of lawmakers and school administrators to
prevent "the next Columbine" or "the next Red Lake" by adopting
zero-tolerance -- one-strike-and-you're-out -- disciplinary
policies. The problem is that one strike doesn't work in baseball,
and it certainly doesn't work in school.

The Guns-Free School Act of 1994 required states -- and thus
schools -- to expel automatically students who bring firearms on to
school property. Since then, zero-tolerance policies have expanded
to include automatic suspensions or expulsions, even in elementary
schools, for fighting, disobedience and disruptive behavior.

Even worse, some schools now skip sending kids to the principal's
office and instead send them straight to jail. "Zero tolerance" has
come to mean that normal kids who pull normal school pranks find
themselves not on suspension but in jail.

Last August, police in Espanola, N.M., arrested Jerry Trujillo, 8,
because he hit a classmate with a basketball and yelled at his
teacher. When he was referred to the school counselor, Jerry, who
had just begun the third grade, started crying and refused to
return to class. The counselor then called the police who, she
said, would confine him "until [he] changes his attitude." Thus a
sobbing 8-year-old entered the criminal-justice system.

Florida is full of such "criminals." Johnnie Lee Morris, 7, of
Monticello, Fla., was arrested for hitting and scratching a
classmate and a teacher. In St. Petersburg, a 5-year-old girl was
arrested for classroom disobedience, including kicking a teacher in
the shin and breaking a candy dish. The 40-pound girl was so small,
police had to use plastic ties on her wrists and chained her ankles
with their handcuffs. What exactly they feared a 5-year-old might
do that justified such restraints is an open question.

Tate Hobart of Visalia, Calif., seemed like your average
11-year-old. According to his mother, Dana, he was a typical
sixth-grader with a few minor behavioral problems but nothing
serious. He even won second place in the most recent school science
fair. But on March 15, he moved into the world of big-time crime --
he threatened another student with a pencil.

Tate claims he threw the pencil across the room in disgust after
being threatened by the other student, then said, "You have no idea
how much I wanted to use that [pencil to hurt you]." But according
to Liberty Elementary School principal Rosemary Spencer, Tate held
the pencil "like a shank" and threatened to harm his
classmate.

We'll never know the whole story because the teacher had stepped
out of the classroom. But school officials thought they knew
enough. And besides, even though both sides agree that no violence
transpired, the California Education Code permits serious
punishment even for such a "threat" of violence. And, as principal
Spencer said, "We had to do something or we could've had another
Columbine or what happened in Minnesota on our hands."

Thus did Tate Hobart, a normal 11-year-old and runner-up in the
science fair, spend six hours in his local jail.

It's high time for common sense to make a comeback and for there to
be zero tolerance for zero-tolerance policies. If a kid brandishes
a real weapon and starts making threats, by all means leap into
action. But when kids are being kids, treat them as such.

That's the idea behind a bill proposed in the Texas legislature by
state Sen. Jon Lindsay. The bill would require administrators to
consider a "student's intent or lack of intent at the time the
student engaged in [forbidden] conduct." His effort has gained
bipartisan support in the wake of a Texas Education Agency finding
that "no probable cause" for criminal charges existed for about a
third of all students prosecuted under the state's existing
zero-tolerance statutes.

The answer to school violence is not to transform schools into
totalitarian police states and lock up every naughty child.
Zero-tolerance policies rob the rule of law of its moral authority
by focusing on punishment rather than justice. Six years after
Columbine, the time has come to break the cycle of hijacking the
memories of violent school tragedies to defend zero-tolerance
injustice.

Trent Englandis a legal policy analyst and Steve Muscatello is a researcher
in the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage
Foundation (heritage.org). For more information, visit overcriminalized.com
.